In recent years, various video compression techniques have been developed and put into practice. In many video compression techniques (for example, MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group)-2, H.264, H.265 (HEVC: High Efficiency Video Coding), and the like), techniques of in-screen prediction (intra-prediction) and inter-screen prediction (inter-prediction) are used when encoding/decoding processing is performed.
Incidentally, with the inter-prediction, images in multiple frames (screens) are processed, which increases the processing time. Furthermore, the screen size tends to increase from full high vision (Full HD (1920×1080) to 4K (e.g., 3840×2160) and 8K (e.g., 7680×4320), and accordingly, the processing time also increases to four times (4K) and 16 times (8K).
Therefore, in recent years, it has been common to encode and decode videos by using multiple processor cores (cores). However, when multiple cores are used, waiting times of cores may occur, for example, in the processing order of decoding.
As described above, various suggestions have been made as image processing techniques efficiently performing image processing by using multiple cores, but in accordance with the increase in the screen size, waiting times of cores may occur, for example, in the processing order of decoding.
Such waiting times of cores may bring about a delay in overall image processing. Therefore, it is preferable to reduce the waiting times of cores. However, in image processing apparatuses having multiple cores, the reduction of the waiting times of cores is not sufficient under the current circumstances.
Incidentally, in the past, various kinds of image processing apparatuses and image processing methods efficiently performing image processing by using multiple cores have been suggested.
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